Home Sweet Walla

I moved to Walla Walla as a first-year Whitman student in August 2006. My mother and her then-partner Denise drove me up the California and Oregon coasts and over to Walla Walla. Neither of them had seen Whitman before; it had been the one school, of the dozens I had visited, that I had visited alone, and it had felt inexplicably good… Yet when we drove through town, Denise looked around and asked me what in the world I had been thinking; she said thank goodness it was only four years and then I could get out.

Seven years later it is summer 2013 and I am preparing to leave a town that I have come to love in ways I never would have believed I could back in 2006. I wrote in my journal last week that, “What I think I’ll miss most about this place is the relative tranquility. My turmoils here have been almost entirely internal, and I know that most people (in my life? in the world?) don’t have that: the luxury of calm belonging, of having place and a community that almost always clasps my hand when I extend it. Maybe it’s that I’ve learned how to extend, to whom, and how– all, of course, relative to this place.”

By Wes Ohler at Immortal Ink. I’m honored that I’m a home for his beautiful work.

I got it to commemorate, to remind, to root. And while I was getting it, even with the bite of the needle and the tension of my body at the imposition of permanence, I felt that internal quiet that I feel in my best moments here.

I am deeply grateful to this place and the people who have connected with me here. Walla Walla’s not perfect, but it has shaped me and become home in so many ways… I know how rare this is, and I want to keep this sense with me as I adventure on.

I never would have believed that I would feel so connected to a place, let alone this one. What a stroke of luck it has been, and what a great reminder to be open.

I’ll be leaving Walla Walla, as my friend would say, with my “heart wide open,” and yet grounded at the same time. It will be difficult to leave, but it feels inexplicably good to have had this and to know it will be with me always.

WPC Reflection 2: Macroaggression

Since the White Privilege Conference I have been trying to pay more attention to matters of in/equity, but the most impactful thing about having attended this is that even when I’m not explicitly paying attention, the content appropriately (finally) leaps to the fore. A conversation about a friend’s trip to hear the Dalai Lama last week led to thinking about macroaggression, graciousness, and picking one’s battles. (His Holiness was given a sun visor and wore it throughout his talk, despite the thick irony of the visor bearing a Nike swoosh.) Chatting about “getting a lot of color” over the sunny weekend became an opportunity to explore the implications of tanning cream and skin lightening cream. (In the words of one of the WPC presenters Dr. Anu Taranath, “who wants what and why” and particularly in the context of colonization?)

One term in particular keeps cropping up; in his WPC keynote “Consumerism as Racial Injustice,” Dr. Paul Gorski introduced me to the term “macroaggressions.” He defined these in the context of microaggressions (those small scale acts and social dis/graces that seem so small but add up to and represent a huge discriminatory impact). Gorski’s macroaggressions, then, are aggressive acts that support macro-level, larger-scale injustices (think on a more structural level) instead of micro-level social ones. And they are everywhere.

Thinging

I have way too much stuff. I don’t know what kind of a void I thought I might fill with all this stuff, but it has taken an enormous amount of time, energy, and money to accumulate and maintain. (What a lucky problem. I don’t get to complain about this.)

My recent urge to purge probably comes from a mixture of a firm but ultimately fleeting chomp from the transition bug and of me productively confronting my addiction to thinging (and the many macroaggressive complicities that come with an unintentional capitalistic lifestyle). Admittedly, though, my privilege allows me to feel confident that I could replace a lot of this later if I change my mind.

Regardless of the proportion of reasonings and privilege, I’m getting rid of a whole lot of stuff. When I move to California in a month or so, I’m trying to fit most of my things into a Civic and when I get there I want to work to keep my thinging on a more modest scale. To do so, I am working on developing some rules before I start thinging again. So far I’m thinking:

1. Is this item uniquely capable of enhancing my engagement with my community?
2. Does it serve a purpose (or better yet multiple purposes) no other possession of mine can fulfill?
3. Is this something no one I know could lend to me?
4. Would I be willing to give away something I currently have to make room for this item?
5. Is it the best fit for me of its kind?

And if I want to make this last, I need to ask myself why in the world I gathered so much stuff to begin with. What patterns of consumption have I inculcated and why?